For many organizations, such as businesses, government agencies, and educational institutions, customer call centers, or simply, call centers are the first point of contact when a customer seeks assistance from that organization or wants to order a product or service offered by the organization. While interactions between agents of a call center and the customers can occur via a variety of mediums, such as telephone, including data network-based telephone services, such as Voice-Over-Internet (VoIP), or via Web applications, keeping the customers satisfied during the interactions remains of prime importance for retaining the business of these customers regardless of the medium involved.
Unfortunately, customer dissatisfaction may be difficult to detect before such dissatisfaction rises to a level that can threaten retention of the customer's business. For example, conventionally, any problems experienced by the customer during a course of an interaction, such as a phone call, can only be remedied by asking to speak with a supervisor of the agent involved in the interaction, hanging up, or ending the call. Resorting to these options can prolong the time necessary to finish the call and require further calls to be made to the call center, which can cause further customer frustration and decrease call center efficiency.
Furthermore, one supervisor generally supervises multiple agents of the call center and controlling progression of all ongoing interactions becomes a difficult task, with the difficulty increasing proportionally to the number of agents being supervised. Unless a customer directly asks for the supervisor to be involved, the supervisor conventionally may not be able to detect that the customer is dissatisfied with the interaction. In turn, the customer may be reluctant to directly ask for the agent to involve the supervisor, out of politeness or a desire to avoid confrontation with the agent involved, until the customer's frustration reaches a level at which the relationship with the customer is already damaged. Once the supervisor does get involved, the supervisor may not be able to undo the damage to the relationship caused by the problems that the customer encountered.
Accordingly, there is a need for a way to detect customer dissatisfaction during an ongoing call center interaction and to make a supervisor of the agent involved in the interaction aware of the detected dissatisfaction.